The Home of Australian Craft Beer

New Beers

Barely a day goes by without another seasonal or one-off special flying out of an Australian brewery (if not ten). Here and in our weekly newsletter, we'll bring you news and, if we've sampled them, our take on as many of them as possible. Happy hunting!

Tapped November 16th, 2018

As Little Creatures celebrates its 18th birthday and is thus able to legally buy itself a beer, the pioneering brewery has marked the milestone with a new core range beer. In doing so, it joins the massed ranks of Aussie brewers with an XPA in their lineup.
It's a choice that acknowledges the growing popularity of approachable, lower bitterness beers that still have the hallmarks of Creatures' hoppy heritage, with their XPA tagged as a "drinker not a thinker".
Showing its youth, the beer…
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Tapped November 16th, 2018

What began in 2003 as a high ABV beer with no dry hopping has, in recent years, become an incredibly hyped beer that, twice a year, Feral have used to spread the message of the importance of freshness in beer as well as the cold chain when it comes to logistics. Sampling spring 2018’s release, the brewery's biggest iteration yet, an hour after the beer was kegged off, there's no doubt that it delivers on this promise. And then some.
Pineapple and papaya are most evident with a wisp of mandarin…
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Tapped November 15th, 2018

People love building boxes. To open tracts of land we assign arbitrary lines of separation, confining ourselves to this or that portion of a map. To carve out our cities, states and countries we create borders, boundaries and bureaucracy within which to live, to separate ourselves from the rest. We put up walls, declare ourselves to be this but not that. We stoke pride and foment envy. Our little boxes come to define us.
Life can be pretty comfortable in a box and, by and large, New South Wales is…
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Tapped November 15th, 2018

Well aren’t they just the pack of sneaky zymurgists at Wildflower. When they released the first Waratah in 2017 they claimed there were only so many bottles in existence. And to be fair they were, technically, telling the truth. They just neglected to mention they’d also rolled a full barrel out back, out of sight and mind. Twelve months on, with a full extra year in oak under its belt, they’ve given the old beer a new release under the name Year Old ‘Tah.
If you can recall the original version…
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Tapped November 15th, 2018

You could argue most of Wildflower’s beers are suited for summer. Without exception, they operate within the well established bounds of acceptable ABV – somewhere in the five percent range but often lower. And a great many of them are acidic, a characteristic easily interchangeable with “refreshing” – a desired characteristic from beer consumed in an often oppressively hot climate. But every now and then the brewer/blender throws out something that feels like it has a little more grunt…
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Tapped November 14th, 2018

When the two couples behind CoConspirators first launched their gypsy brewing operation, they did so with a West Coast IPA known as The Henchman. That was back in 2016, at a time when the haze craze hadn’t fully draped its foggy murk over Australia’s craft beer scene and finding an IPA packed with bitterness wasn’t quite the challenge it is today.
For those who like their IPAs big and bitter, the decision by the CoConspirators to bring The Henchman back into their core range of cans in 2018…
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Tapped November 14th, 2018

They've already got the Reserve Road Draught in their lineup as a nod to their locale and now the team at Bad Shepherd has come up with a new beer that cements their position as proud Victorians. The Victoria Pale Ale, packed in cans featuring the state's navy blue livery and the slogan: "GROWN HERE MADE HERE", is brewed with malt from Barrett Burston in Geelong, Vic Secret and Topaz hops from Hop Product Australia’s Rostrevor farm in the High Country and water from Melbourne. But where…
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Tapped November 14th, 2018

The IPA series continues apace at Bad Shepherd, where the likes of The Almighty IIPA and the aromatic-as-anything Citrus & Cedar IPA are now joined by this Grapefruit IPA to which fruit rather than fruit extract was added alongside a selection of hops known for their citrusy qualities.
It's a hazy copper pour and one that heads towards the more bitter, pithy, tangy side of grapefruit; certainly, it's of a different ilk to some fruit IPAs that present more as a blend between IPA and fruit juice.…
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Tapped November 14th, 2018

Chances are, if you've read about a beer from WA in the past couple of years on The Crafty Pint, the words originated with Guy Southern or, to give him his online handle, Goodtimes Craft Beer. Not this time around, however. And that's for a very good reason: Guy was involved in the conception and brewing of this one.
He travelled south from Perth to hook up with the team at Rocky Ridge, where they were also joined by folks from de Vine Cellars and set about creating the 4,723rd (or thereabouts) collaboration…
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Tapped November 14th, 2018

Serendipity strikes again for Matty Wilson. Whenever he mentions a new beer concept to his Albany hop grower, he’s encouraged to talk with the lady next door, Val. Not only does Val have a mini-orchard to drawn from but she also happens to have twenty 30-year old yuzu trees – not the kind of thing you’d normally expect to find in the Great Southern.
Originally a wild hybrid citrus found in China, yuzu has become highly sought after in the brewing world for its complex sour mandarin–grapefruit-lime-like…
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Tapped November 13th, 2018

As the temperatures in WA edge towards the mid-20s, a pack of more crushable New World sours is starting to appear. We say "New World" as you can trace a lineage to classic puckering styles yet modern brewing techniques and punter tastes have rounded off the edges, so to speak, positioning these beers in more approachable territory than the battery acid like pH levels of some predecessors.
For Beerland, Acid Wolf’s use of the modern lactic Sour Pitch yeast delivers a perfect example of…
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Tapped November 13th, 2018

When we’ve gone a while without a beer, we talk about being parched and breaking the drought. But here’s a beer that really aims to help with drought.
Ballistic Beer is an Australian brewery. Bintani is an Australian grain supplier. They both know the importance of Australian agriculture, and they’re both keen to help out rural communities and struggling farmers when the going’s tough. That’s why Mitch Bradey from Bintani and Lachy Crothers from Ballistic got together to brew the Signature…
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Tapped November 13th, 2018

Ballistic is comfortable with lagers. They proudly hold a craft lager in their core lineup. They call it Dirty Word, and push back against the idea that lager is a dirty word. Their head brewer will tell anyone who listens that a clean, well-made, true-to-style lager is one of his favourite things to drink. So it’s fun to see that they’re also happy to take a lager and boldly throw a bazillion hops in it until it’s almost unrecognisable as a lager.
They used apple puree in the boil to provide…
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Tapped November 13th, 2018

Twang is a sound: the snap of a guitar string, the spring of a diving board, the shock of Wile E Coyote being shot from a giant bow. Twang is a sound… so how does it so perfectly describe the taste of this beer??
This tropical kettle sour is super light yellow and slightly cloudy, with plenty of hop presence on the nose thanks to the Galaxy, Wakatu and Citra. Take a sip, and experience citrus… with a twang. Passionfruit… with a twang. Mango, peach, apricot… with a twang. It could also be…
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Tapped November 13th, 2018

Back in the heady days of 2015 when small breweries were still relatively rare and small distilleries rarer still, the Batch Brewing Co teamed up with the fledgling Archie Rose distillery on an experiment: they made a beer brewed not only to go with a spirit, but also to be turned into it. The beer was the First Wash Rye IPA and it was later distilled into the Hopped Rye Spirit, with both released simultaneously at venues around Sydney as a rather incestuous form of boilermaker – read about it…
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Tapped November 12th, 2018

There's plenty of local breweries with lagers in their lineups these days, but it wasn't always the case. Moorabbin's 2 Brothers have been playing there for years, however, initially with the Taxi Pilsner before adding Kung Foo, a rice lager, to the lineup in 2012. It's been one of the brewery's best-sellers ever since, picked up a gold medal at the 2018 Australian International Beer Awards and, in the lead-up to summer 2018, became the first of their beers to appear in cans.
A bright golden colour…
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Tapped November 12th, 2018

Late in 2017, as part of their tenth birthday celebrations, the two brothers behind 2 Brothers and their team launched a new version of one of their trophy-winning beers from the past, The Guvnor strong ale. There was a bit of a twist, however, as they'd split the beer into four parts, ageing them in different ways. Part 1 spent six months on French oak and has been followed by this version, which sat inside barrels obtained from Port Melbourne's Starward Whisky.
Thus, while Part 1 was softened by…
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Tapped November 12th, 2018

The Blackman's Brewery crew has never been shy when it comes to celebrating their surrounds and those around them. There's the beers named after family members, past releases tied to surfing competitions taking place just along the coast from their Torquay home and collaborations with local artists too. And, with this beer, they've gone and actually included some of their surrounds in the shape of seawater lugged from the nearby beaches and poured into an IPA.
It's not the first time we've come across…
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Tapped November 11th, 2018

On November 28, Stone & Wood will mark ten years of beers. They've got all manner of plans in place – not to mention a new brewpub coming online in Brisbane – and among them is this beer. It couldn't be much further from the beer upon which the business has been built, but it's certainly the sort you pull out for a special occasion: an imperial stout aged for ten months in former Port barrels.
The choice of fortified wine barrels rather than the bourbon or whisky more typically used for barrel…
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Tapped November 9th, 2018

The puns keep coming thick and fast from the team at Two Birds – as do the IPAs – with this one continuing in the same theme as the brewery's recent NEIPA. Here, we go from Jucius Caesar to Et Tu, Brut? and from hazy IPA to their take on the Brut variant.
Without travelling to the West Coast of the US to try the beers that launched the style, we can't be certain exactly how such beers are supposed to present, but this one seems to tick the boxes from its descriptors. It's very pale and clear,…
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The Crafty Pint is an independent online magazine and resource for anyone interested in craft beer in Australia. We bring an honest, old-fashioned journalistic approach to beer's brave new world, telling stories because they're worth telling not because someone is paying us to write them.

Like many of the people who have changed the face of beer in Australia, we believe in authenticity, integrity, enjoyment and love. We hope to play a role in helping good beer, brewed by good people, find its way into the hands of more drinkers.